The present invention relates to communication systems and integrated circuit (IC) devices. More particularly, the present invention provides an optical modulator device using a three-terminal driver interface.
Over the last few decades, the use of communication networks has exploded. In the early days of the Internet, popular applications were limited to emails, bulletin board, and mostly informational and text-based web page surfing, and the amount of data transferred was usually relatively small. Today, Internet and mobile applications demand a huge amount of bandwidth for transferring photo, video, music, and other multimedia files. For example, a social network like Facebook processes more than 500 TB of data daily. With such high demands on data and data transfer, existing data communication systems need to be improved to address these needs.
CMOS technology is commonly used to design communication systems implementing Optical Fiber Links As CMOS technology is scaled down to make circuits and systems run at higher speed and occupy smaller chip (die) area, the operating supply voltage is reduced for lower power. Conventional FET transistors in deep-submicron CMOS processes have very low breakdown voltage as a result the operating supply voltage is maintained around 1 Volt. However, the Optical Modulators used in 100G-class optical links often require a bias voltage of more than 2 Volts across the anode and cathode nodes of the modulator for effective optical amplitude and/or phase modulation. These limitations provide significant challenges to the continued improvement of communication systems scaling and performance.